Building extraction and reconstruction from LIDAR data

This paper presents an approach for building extraction and reconstruction from high quality terrain surface, such as LIDAR data generated surface. The approach takes terrain surface data as input and goes through edge detection, edge classification, building points extraction, TIN model generation, and building reconstruction to extract and reconstruct buildings and building related information. For building detection, it detects edges from the surface data and classifies edges to distinguish building edges from other edges based on their geometry and shapes, including orthogonality, parallelism, circularity and symmetry. The classified building edges are then used as boundaries to extract building points and TIN models are generated with the extracted points. Each building has its own TIN model and its surfaces are derived from the TIN model. The test results demonstrate that the approach is capable to extract and reconstruct 3-D building models from high quality terrain surface. The paper presents the concept, algorithms and processes/procedures of the approach and discusses its advantages and limitations. The paper also shows experimental results and discusses the performance/effects of the geometric and shape constraints utilized in the experiments. At the end, the paper concludes with some thoughts for future development.